Posted by Dell
a resident of Another Pleasanton neighborhood
on Nov 1, 2013 at 5:58 am

Dave you are correct when you say pigs are not native to Northern America. However to say they are encroaching on our land rather than the other way around is a stretch of the imagination to say the least. The pig was first introduced to Northern America in 1539. I would say it has earned the right to call itself a native. Either way it's a wild animal and as we build more and more outside of city limits we have to expect interactions with all wild animals.

Posted by Scott
a resident of Another Pleasanton neighborhood
on Nov 1, 2013 at 11:26 am

I agree that the more we expand our neighborhoods the more we need to understand the nature we disrupt or displace. But we also need to understand the effects of introducing animals and altering nature, either by accident (domestic pigs gone wild) or by design as is the case of our local Turkeys.
Our over abundance of Turkeys is now feeding an expanding population of predators such as Coyotes and now possibly Mountain Lions. Nature is only trying to balance things out that we've unbalanced, unfortunately it's quite predictable what the result of this will be. The predators in close proximity to the neighborhoods get "used" to being around humans, and the expected interactions cause dangerous situations sometimes leading to injury...or worse...(to either Human or Wild animal, or both)
Yes, our population needs to be educated on safely interacting with our wild friends. And unless we control the predators food source from getting too large, the predator population will get out of hand as well. This includes Turkeys as well as Deer.

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